Go Borough!

Port Melbourne won the VFL Grand Final today beating age-old rivals Williamstown 22.12.144 to 13.10.88. It's been 29 years since our last premiership and there are a lot of happy people in The Borough tonight. This is one of the banners that the local Council hung on the Port Melbourne Town Hall earlier in the week to celebrate the team reaching the Grand Final.

No doubt you are wondering what this has to do with Art Deco, especially since the Town Hall is very clearly a Victorian building, designed by J J Wild and constructed in 1882. However in the late 1930s, the then Port Melbourne City Engineer, Fred Cook, redesigned the auditorium and Council Chamber in Art Deco style.

courtesy Port Melbourne Historical & Preservation Society

Above is a photo of the Red Cross Ball held for the official opening of the remodelled auditorium on May 24th, 1938. The auditorium has been modified several times since then and sadly little or none of the 1938 hall remains. This ship plaque (below) was salvaged and is now part of the collection of the Port Melbourne Historical & Preservation Society.

courtesy Port Melbourne Historical & Preservation Society

I mentioned that at the same time Cook also designed the Council Chamber but around the 1960s a false ceiling was put in and the lovely deco ceiling he designed was covered up until several years ago after a severe storm when part of the ceiling collapsed. Here is some detail from Cook's ceiling which I was lucky enough to photograph before it was removed and replaced with a very, very plain, dare I say boring, barrel vaulted Victorian facsimile.

I know PMTH is a Victorian building so I can understand the desire to put in a Victorian ceiling but I think there was a very strong reason to retain at least some of the Art Deco. Cook also designed some furniture for the room and this is his original hand-drawn sketch.

courtesy Port Melbourne Historical & Preservation Society

And this furniture still sits in the Council Chamber somewhat at odds with its Victorianised surroundings.

A Shop in Port Melbourne

I wrote about this former shop at 9a Raglan Street, Port Melbourne almost three years ago but today I was prompted to do some research into its history.

My source of information was the archives of the Port Melbourne Historical & Preservation Society (PMHPS) where I was able to view information from the Sands & McDougall directories and a database of Port People compiled from local church records and some family details provided by researchers and people looking into their family trees.

A man called John Byrne set up a grocers, certainly not in this exact shop front but in this location on the corner of Raglan Street and Easplanade East in 1891. He was married to Margaret Cecilia (Torris) and they had seven children over the the next fourteen years.

Joseph Vincent Byrne was born in 1895 and by 1924 he had joined his father in the grocery business. Joseph was married to Bridget Agnes (Stenson) by the early to mid 1920s because, as we will see later, they had a daughter, Imelda Joan, born around this time.

John & Joseph continued to work together for around the next decade afterwhich the business is listed solely under Joseph's name.

Joseph & Bridget's daughter Imelda was a school teacher when she married a clerk from Bentleigh called Francis Wellesley Walker at St Joseph's Church, Rouse Street in Feburary 1954. At that time Joseph gave his occupation as a grocer.

That's where my research trail goes cold but for over 60 years, John & Joseph Byrne, father and son, together and separately ran a grocers shop here and, in all probability, added this handsome modern shop front during the Art Deco period.

So why was I prompted to re-visit this particular former shop. You may have already guessed that, in a good sense, it is a former shop no longer. It is the temple of art ... where art meets design, an exciting addition to the Port artistic landscape.

It is so good to see these older building used again and I wish them much success over the next 60 years or so.

Swallows of Port Melbourne

For most of its life this Port Melbourne pub was known as the Southern Cross Hotel. From 1873 to around 1990 this was certainly the case. After that time it became Swallows Hotel or as their sign reads, Swallows of Port Melb.

At some time in the 1930s this Victorian building got a makeover to become Port's most deco of pubs.

From a distance the corner parapret with its three speedlines and flagpole are the most noticable features but standing on the footpath in front of the hotel, these dark green panels are clearly the best Art Deco elements on the facade.

Reference:
Chartered Scoundrels - A Brief History of Port Melbourne Hotels, by Pat Grainger, Port Melbourne Historical and Preservation Society, April 2007.

former Rootes Motors, Port Melbourne

This building on Fishermens Bend, the largely industrial part of Port Melbourne developed around the outbreak of WWII, is the former Australian factory for the British motor manufacturer Rootes. I remember it as a storage facility for KMart and now the western end of the building is home to Melbourne Indoor Paintball.

The building was built around the end of WWII and the national Archive of Australia holds two excellent photos of the building from 1945. Search for Image Number L1647 for a view of the building from ground level while L1849 is an aerial view showing the extent of the factory at that time.

You will have noticed the flagpole, an Art Deco steadfast, but if you look closely at the face of the other wall in the first photo you'll also find another Art Deco steadfast, a clock.

Unfortuately everything is painted in a two-tone Mission Brown selection which does the building no favours at all. It looks like it may have been white or cream or perhaps even grey in 1945.

I was pleased to see the original gates, or at least one of them, still in place. Rusted in place actually, but it does show the Art Deco design and I can only image how good they looked 60 years ago.

Australian Furniture Timbers, Port Melbourne

This modest Art Deco warehouse or factory building is in Plummer Street, Port Melbourne.

Note the band of thin, dark bricks across the front of the building. The same bricks are used as a border around the entrance and as decoration above and on each sides of the windows.

The lintel above the doorway carries the name of the business, Australian Furniture Timbers and the building is 'anchored' to the ground with a row of dark bricks angled to create a slopping ledge.

The decorative highlight, however, like the gate in yesterday's post, is the metalwork. In this case, the grills on the windows are stunning.

A House in Port Melbourne

I'm not sure exactly what to make of this house in Port Melbourne.

From the distance it looks like so many single-storey double-fronted houses in the area. Certainly the corrugated iron pitched roof and the chimneys could be from the mid 19th Century but the front is deco.

There is a small step in the roofline and thin bricks in a stepped pattern on the sides and tops of the windows.

I wish I knew someone at the Port Melbourne Historical and Preservation Society who could do some research on the house and perhaps unravel some of the mystery.

Hang on a minute, I do know someone ... me!!! I'll report back if I find anything.

Update: 28 July 2010

I dropped past this house today and was surprised to find that it is currently undergoing the next stage of its evolution. The old windows are being replaced with french doors with a small window off to the side. The decorative bricks around the windows have been kept but are now painted the same colour as the rest of the house.

The low wall is gone and I suspect they will build a much taller wall to create a courtyard at the front of the house with the french doors opening onto it.